In life, you don’t have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you’re a CEO. CEOs aren’t born.
BEN HOROWITZDon’t punk out and don’t quit.
More Ben Horowitz Quotes
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When you’re making a critical decision, you have to understand how it’s going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you’re talking to, but the people that aren’t in the room. Everybody else.
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You’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.
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The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.
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In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
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For example, the vast majority of security break-ins occur as a result of problems with known fixes. With an automated system, you can keep up to date.
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As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.
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It’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.
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Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.
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In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right.
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Volatility and length, that’s the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that’s a big valuable thing.
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There are no silver bullets.
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Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
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Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?
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Don’t punk out and don’t quit.
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One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.
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Here’s Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can’t even deal with him because he’s always saying something that people go, ‘Oh, I can’t believe Kanye said that. I can’t believe he did that.’
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Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.
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These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.
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Here’s where we are and here’s what I didn’t recognize about us and about you when I made the decision, and now it is what it is.
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Your employees know each other better than they know you.
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There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.
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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.
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In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
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When raising money, you want to look through the lens of ‘What happens when things go wrong?’
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